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SOCIAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA ANNOUNCES HER 36TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE (VIRTUAL CONFERENCE2020)

Theme: Value Education in a Plural Society: Treading the Holistic Path

Date: 9th to 14th November, 2020

Preamble

The removal of religious issues from the National Value Education Curriculum has reduced the embedded themes into three, namely: Social Studies, Civic Education and Security Education. The reduction of Social Studies which is the original custodian of civic issues and education on problems of deviance and social control (security education) has generated a lot of agitations and sentiments bothering on outright departure from the purposes for which Social Studies was introduced to the schools and has also confused the curriculum enactors (teachers) on which method(s) to use in teaching the perceived erratic themes isolated for teaching in the National Value Education Curriculum. The perceived misconceptions that History teaches national values more than Social Studies and the  affronts from graduates of Political Science (Government Teachers), that Social Studies teachers cannot teach or examine Civic Education at Senior School Certificate level are all disturbing the mindsets of Social Studies teacher trainers, who see the misconceptions and affronts as departures from the original facts that Civic Education was taken from Social Studies and Security Education should not be seen as a new organising centre (theme), but are part of the University and College of Education Social Studies teacher training curricula. As Social Studies experts and practitioners, we hesitate to claim that the curriculum designers might not have taken cognisance of the holistic nature of Social Studies.

The events that are unfolding around Social Studies are suggesting the need to take the plight of Social Studies to the desk of its original curriculum designers and developers. With a bunch of experiences and the agitations in the mind of Social Studies scholars, it is imperative to have a compendium of field experiences that are both  theoretical and empirical, which could be useful to provide relevant  information that may guide National Value Education stakeholders to revise its curriculum, to make value education to retrace its root to Social Studies, seek new avenues to reposition itself by way of a name such as "Social and Civic Studies' or any other name that will make Social Studies achieve its objectives; and that the contents of Civic Education at the Senior Secondary School should be taken as part of value education that it is, rather than seeing it as a new form of learning or as an alternative to Social Studies or a parallel subject to Government which Political Science graduates would be struggling for, even when it is outside the domain of their over-theoretical discipline.

Read more: SOSAN's 36TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT